Education board member's book not for the faint of heart

Not a book for the faint of heartCOMMENTARY

LISA FALKENBERG, Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle |
December 11, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama's pro-choice stance on abortion is the same sort of "fascist, supremacist attitude exhibited by Mussolini and Hitler."

Public education is tyrannical, unconstitutional and the Satan-following Left's "subtly deceptive tool of perversion." And parents who surrender their children to government-run schools are "throwing them into the enemy's flames even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch."

These aren't the beliefs of just any right-wing Christian zealot — no offense to the right wing or to Christians in general — but one who was elected by Texas voters to help shape the curriculum for all of Texas' 4.5 million public schoolchildren.

No shock to voters

State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, offers these perspectives — and other keen observations that would be labeled dangerous religious extremism in other countries — in her recent book, One Nation Under God: How the Left Is Trying to Erase What Made Us Great.

But Dunbar's writings shouldn't shock voters of the 16-county area who elected her. After all, the author last week told my colleague, Gary Scharrer, of the Chronicle's Austin bureau, that she made her positions known during her campaign in 2006 and proudly carried every county in District 10.

But for some reason, this forthright candidate, who — considering her views on public education, must have openly campaigned as an accomplice to tyranny — wasn't entirely comfortable with the views in her book being aired in the media.

When Scharrer questioned Dunbar about portions of the book circulated in a press release, she maintained her writings were intended only as an educational tool to the body of Christ, and not for the general public.

She phrases it a bit differently in the book, writing that it's "not intended for the faint-at-heart or the apathetic, the complacent or the deceived."

In other words: Anyone who doesn't agree.

Fear of tyranny

Her pre-election writings about Obama apparently weren't for the prying eyes of the general public, either.

In a piece for Christianworldviewnetwork.com, Dunbar wrote that Obama, the terrorist sympathizer, would bring tyranny to America by declaring martial law after his accomplices attack our soil.

The commentary, condemned by conservatives and progressives alike, was quickly removed from the Web site.

But her book is available at Amazon.com for anyone to read, even a tool-of-Satan, mainstream media columnist like me.

Dunbar peddles the book on her Web site and encourages readers to share it. If it's required reading for those who believe like her, it's even more so for those of us who don't.

She describes a cultural war defined by absolutes. The doctrine of separation of church and state is a "fallacious principle" intended to brainwash America's children with a secular, humanist world view, she argues.

She writes that Democrats who support their party's platform can't be true, Bible-believing Christians.

All U.S. pastors have a religious duty to toe the Republican Party line and forgo their tax-exempt status so they can preach it from the pulpit.

Obama as Hitler?

The Founding Fathers created "an emphatically Christian government" and, thus, every person who wants to govern in this country should have "sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God."

Dunbar argues that America's declining, immoral society is in need of Christian soldiers who will rise up to save it. At one point, she proclaims that the similarities between our society and that of "pre-Holocaust" Nazi Germany are "striking."

She lists the similarities, and then comes to the leadership component.

"Well, I guess that is the one missing ingredient," she writes. "After all, we certainly lack a charismatic, driven leader with a hidden agenda, a leader who comes out of nowhere who seems to command the awe and allegiance of many. Or are we?"

This elected state official seems to be suggesting our newly elected president could be the next Adolf Hitler.

Dunbar is free to express such beliefs. But, unfortunately, it isn't just a narrow, fringe group of Christian fundamentalists she's reaching when she makes decisions on the State Board of Education.

Whether it's about reading, evolution or a far-right version of Bible curriculum she and other board members are pushing, Cynthia Dunbar is touching every public schoolchild in Texas.